


As Necessary

by Ponderosa



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Age Difference, Cunnilingus, Dom/sub Undertones, Established Relationship, F/M, Older Characters, Older Woman, Older Woman/Younger Man, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:23:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2242320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ponderosa/pseuds/Ponderosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why here?” she asks. Her fingers curl around a fresh mug of tea. She has to lift it with both hands to drink, but if she’s frustrated at the weakness of her own body she doesn’t show it.</p><p>James drops sugar into his own cup and raises it in a mock toast. “Seems somebody sold my flat.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Necessary

**Author's Note:**

> The post-canon fix-it that I've wanted to write since the first time I watched the credits roll.

The road is rough and unforgiving. James feels every bump and dip in the tarmac as if he’s being dragged behind the old van and not nestled safely in the back with the hounds curling around him. Their furred bodies are warm at his spine and behind his knees. One pup has settled so near his face its whiskers tickle against his cheek and its breath huffs along his jaw. He thinks wryly that he'll never get the smell of damp fur out of his nose, but he greedily takes their heat, his core temperature rising as the miles pass by in agonizing slowness.

At times M moans--thin feverish sounds that should worry James, only he takes them for granted in much the same way he has always taken her for granted. She's alive and he has her in his arms, and the devil himself will need to come collect before he's ready to let her go.

*

He sutures M’s wound in the back room of a village chemist's. She's laid out on an old metal desk, the papers and adding machine and everything else it'd held swept off onto the floor. His hand trembles alarmingly as he passes needle through flesh pinched tight beneath his fingers. No blood follows the needle, no whines of pain.

Yesterday Kincade might have had words about breaking and entering, but his face bears only the same ashen determination as James’s. "She's a tough old bird,” he says, hope renewed after the ugly scene in the church had nearly done them all in. He grips a bottle of TCP like a rosary.

James’s jaw aches from the grim line his mouth holds as he does his best to undo Silva’s handiwork. Peeling back M’s blood-soaked blouse had revealed a ricochet wound--there’d been no bullet to plug the hole and the gash had bled M a worrisome amount. The risk of infection is as troubling as the blood loss. He shakes his hand out before placing it back to her side and finishing out the row of clumsy stitches. She whimpers softly at the last pass of the needle.

“Not my finest work,” he remarks, snipping the suture thread. The lines look dark and brutish against her pale skin. He dries the area carefully and gestures to Kincade for the gauze and tape. “She’s going to have a nasty scar.”

“Not the lady’s first by the look of it,” Kincade says. He gently gathers the front of her ruined blouse and hides away the new wound along with the old scars.

James leaves him buttoning up her coat and starts raiding the shelves. He grabs antibiotics first, then painkillers, and tosses anything else that’ll fetch a penny into a drawstring bag. He forces the till and empties it into the bag as well, taking everything down to the last. It won’t get them far, but it’ll do.

“Take the van,” Kincade says, as if James had any other notion. Yet James is glad not to have had to insist. Kincade’s fingers are warm and reassuring as he puts the keys in James’s palm and closes his fingers over them. The man’s faith may buoy him all the way back to London. “Me and the lads will stay up the road and wait for the constable.”

“Thank you,” James says, and means it.

His legs are wobbly as he carries M back to the van. Kincade hastens forward to open the door and the hounds pour out, milling restlessly as their master helps James ease M onto the seat. Kincade fastens her seatbelt as James jogs around to the drivers.

“Be safe, the both of you.” Kincade’s mouth closes to a line as he eases the door shut, careful not to jostle M as her unconscious body lists to the side.

The keys bite viciously into James’s palm, leaving ugly little marks behind when he jams them into the ignition. He swallows down the sour taste that builds in his throat. M looks small and fragile in the van’s big leather seats, distant in a way that’s terrifyingly different than the yawning space that had stretched between them in his DB5.

If she dies on the road to London, James may not know it. He keeps one hand on the wheel and finds hers with the other. His fingers slip to her wrist. He measures the feeble beat of her pulse the entire way.

*

She wakes--really wakes, bright-eyed and lucid for the first time in weeks--in a small flat in Chinatown. James helps her wash and dress and take a seat at a tiny drop-leaf table beneath the window. There’s no view through the panes; the previous tenant had already done the work of covering them up with newspaper. M aims a keenly arched brow at him as Cantonese bleeds through the thin walls.

“Why here?” she asks. Her fingers curl around a fresh mug of tea. She has to lift it with both hands to drink, but if she’s frustrated at the weakness of her own body she doesn’t show it.

James drops sugar into his own cup and raises it in a mock toast. “Seems somebody sold my flat.”

Her laugh is as sharp and sudden as gunfire, and it pierces him centre-left. She sobers up just as quickly. A faint shift of her hips speaks of the wound still paining her. Her lips purse briefly. “I suppose it’s fitting.”

“Poetic, one might say.”

“So it's my turn is it, to be dead."

“Everyone deserves the chance at least once."

“I take it they've already given my desk away.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mallory?”

“Mallory.”

“Could've been worse, I suppose.”

The wall clock ticks through long seconds that grow into minutes. When he can’t take the weight of the silence any longer, James sets his mug aside and plucks at the front of M's dressing gown, lifting it away to study her body in the weak light of the single bare bulb. With the sutures removed, the sloppiness of his work is even more apparent, but the wound continues to heal, if slowly. The bruises are fading and the angry red of infection has been beaten away by the antibiotics.

“James, really,” M says, when his gaze leaves her side and travels up and over her bare breast. She catches the edge of the dressing gown and draws it closed again. The faint colour in her cheeks is both charming and a bit of a relief. “You’re incorrigible.”

He snaps off a cluster of grapes from the bowl between them. Taking a grape for himself, he leaves the rest in front of her. Sweetness spreads on his tongue as he rises, dipping down again to press a kiss to the top of her head before he gathers his coat. He leaves a sturdy umbrella within reach for her to use in lieu of a cane. “And you need your strength back if I’m to prove it.”

"Get out," she says, tone not at all stern.

"I'll give Mallory your best."

Her quietly dismissive, "Fuck off," keeps a smile on his face all the way down the stairwell.

*

He comes and goes rather like a cat, M remarks archly--something she claims to be long accustomed to. But he’s on a schedule not of his own devising. Each time he tends to her he finds she needs less of his help to get around the flat, and eventually he stops worrying when he leaves to go jump through Mallory’s many hoops.

Day after day James sits through mandatory counseling sessions, physical therapy, yet more counseling sessions that Mallory insists cannot be suffered in silence, and one droll meeting after another. When he can, he spends his nights with M, taking the chair at the foot of the bed, familiar curves of a Walther warm in his palm.

He’ll end up in the field again. He needs to, for himself and for Britain. As it is, it’s like trudging through snow, putting one foot before the other, endlessly plodding towards a warm light glowing in the distance while behind him M turns into silhouette and shadow. Each step he takes towards the promise of recertification is a heavy one. He confides this in a session but doesn’t attribute the cause.

On a Tuesday morning, he passes his marksmanship exam with a tight cluster of shots that exceeds the skill he had before all that shrapnel cocked up his shoulder. Mallory has nothing to hand him but the agenda for another meeting. Tactical advisory. He swallows a scowl and tucks the folder under his arm.

“Don’t worry, 007, you’ll have your hands full soon enough,” Miss Moneypenny assures him in passing. Her perfectly manicured fingernail scrapes along his sleeve.

That night he dreams of fire.

*

“I can’t stay here forever and you know it.”

“As long as you promise not to leave for another hour,” James says. His mouth is on M’s shoulder, peppering it with kisses. His hand strokes gently along her hip, careful to avoid the tender patch of scarring skin. He eases a fraction closer to her as his fingers inch the satin of her nightgown up her thigh. She grants him such liberties that his hands threaten to shake.

“Oh, an hour, feeling generous are we?“

James spreads his palm out flat along her hip again, rubbing the satin against her skin in small circles. “I’m a very thoughtful lad.”

“Thoughtful is not the adjective I would’ve chosen.” M’s belly twitches and she gives up on fighting a quiet sigh. “But that does feel pleasant, so don’t you dare stop.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am.”

They haven’t fucked that many times. Not as often as James would like, anyhow, or when he considers the long years he’s been in M’s service. She’s had him six ways from Sunday regardless, including one very memorable time on the sofa in her office, and yet it remains a thrill every single time she doesn’t send him packing.

Soon enough he’s rocking his erection against her and has a handful of her tits. He’s always loved the softness of them, the way that even if he spreads his hand to the fullest, there’s more to spill over his fingers. She pulls the hem of her gown higher, catching his hand to guide it between her legs. He strokes her until she's wet enough that each pass of his fingers is frictionless, slipping across where her clit is tight and eager for his touch. Her breath grows shallow, carrying whispers of sound that build toward a moan. Triumph surges through him when he stops and stands to strip and she can't keep her eyes off his prick.

Oh, he wants to fuck her so badly the desire thrums in his teeth. He wants to push her legs wide with his knees and pierce her sweet cunt and go so hard and deep that each thrust ripples through the softness of her belly and her breasts. He wants her to be whole and healed enough to sit on his face after and make him lick the come right out of her.

Maybe in another month, but now-- Now he curls his hands into the bedding beneath her and _pulls_. He smothers a grin at her yelp as the covers slide her towards him. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, and sinks to the floor, his knees spreading wide beneath the frame of the bed.

“The hell you didn’t,” she snaps. He hesitates for only a moment until he’s certain her bark has no bite.

“Guilty as charged.” Slowly he spreads his arms out, her legs as light as a bird’s as he works them up and over his shoulders. Her skin is soft as silk beneath the open brush of his mouth and the smell of her is intoxicating. Another time he would’ve likely continued the wordplay to see just how much she’d permit before threatening to kick him out, but she doesn’t have the power to strip him of his rank anymore, or the strength yet to make the threat of a cane against his backside more than a fleeting thrill.

So he murmurs apologies all the way to the peak of her thighs, lips passing light over the wisps of white that curl softly along the wet crease of her cunt. He tongues her the way he knows she likes it--the way she’d taught him, back before he’d taken to heart that a woman always comes first. He goes until his jaw and tongue is aching and his knees are sore, until his prick is as wet as his chin and the press of M’s thighs around his ears quavers delightfully.

She comes with an explosive sigh, her next breath on the edge of a sob. He sits on his heels, fist tight around his cock, stroking slowly as he watches her clit cease its throbbing and her limbs go soft.

“Are you waiting for permission?” she asks, when he stays where he is still hard in hand.

“Not tonight.” He lays his left hand on her knee, brushes his thumb across a bruise that darkens her skin. “Simply enjoying the view.”

M makes a derisive sound, and then snaps her fingers. The sound cracks through the flat and lances like fire along his nerves. “Put your mouth back where it was,” she tells him, and runs a fond hand over his skull when he does.

He loses all thought of a leisurely wank when the slow petting turns into a sharp twist of his ear. He smothers his face between her legs and when he brings her off a second time he’s quick to follow, wringing one out on the wood of the floor. Each gasping breath he takes tastes like M’s cunt and he grins as he wipes his hand over his mouth and stands.

“Somewhere you need to be?” she asks, when he doesn’t join her on the bed again and fall into another round of kisses.

He gathers up his clothes as she watches with a critical eye. He wonders at times if she can read his mind. On the off-chance that she can’t, he explains, “I need to wash up. Mallory’s expecting me to be late, but not that late.”

“James,” she says, and he pauses at the threshold. “A man can’t serve two masters.”

*

He returns to find the flat empty.

The roll of bills hidden in the tin in the back of the cupboard is gone, as is the pistol taped to the bottom of the low shelf in the pantry.

The bed is neatly made.

Her coat with the ugly stain is folded neatly on the chair where he’d spent so many nights. In an envelope tucked inside the breast pocket he finds a Tennyson poem written in M’s spidery hand that says many things, but which is signed with a simple, Farewell, 007.

He sits there for a long time in the ugly little flat, fingers knotted so tightly in the wool that when he notices the stitching on the inside of the lining near the hem doesn’t match, his hand aches as he goes for his knife. Slicing through the satin reveals nothing at first. It takes a bit of prying to reveal a key wedged into the hem like a penny for weight.

It’s ordinary, and the lint in the grooves says it lived in that corner of M’s coat for a very long time, but she’s left it for him--a challenge to take up when he’s ready for it. He’s not sure he ever will be, but he supposes, if anyone knows that, it would be M. A second look around confirms that she’d left the place cleaner than a mop-up crew, so he deals with the coat and the letter, watching the flames until there’s nothing left but the bit of brass in his pocket to remember her by.

Back at headquarters, his fingers transfer a smudge of ash to Moneypenny’s wrist. “Hold onto this for me, would you?” he asks, pressing the key into her cool fingers.

Her voice follows him down the corridor. “For how long?”

Bless her for not even asking why. He doesn't turn to answer, simply places one foot before the other. “For as long as necessary."


End file.
